Ethiopia Saluting the Colors
Ethiopia Saluting the Colors - context Summary
American Civil War
Whitman's "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" depicts an aged African woman greeting passing Union regiments during Sherman’s march. She speaks briefly of being torn from her family and brought across the sea, then silently salutes the guidons. The poem registers the Civil War’s disruption and Whitman’s attention to the presence and suffering of African Americans. It appears in Leaves of Grass and reflects Whitman’s wartime observations.
Read Complete Analyses1 WHO are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human, With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet? Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet? 2 (’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sand and pines, Forth from thy hovel door, thou, Ethiopia, com’st to me, As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea.) 3 Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sunder’d, A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught; Then hither me, across the sea, the cruel slaver brought. 4 No further does she say, but lingering all the day, Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye, And curtseys to the regiments, the guidons moving by. 5 What is it, fateful woman—so blear, hardly human? Why wag your head, with turban bound—yellow, red and green? Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or have seen?
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